Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Containing and Expanding Therapeutic Possibilities

163 Pages·2021·1.584 MB·English

by  Kevin Dew

COMPLEMENTARY AND
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a sociological investigation of
complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in contemporary society, and
an exploration of the forces throughout the globe, across different institutions,
and within different therapeutic spaces, that constrain or foster alternative
medicine.
Drawing on 30 years of research, the book identifies the trends in the use of
CAM and explores the scientific, political and social challenges that CAM faces
in relation to orthodox medicine. The author examines the varieties of CAM
practices and how they manifest in different institutional spaces – including public
inquiries, the orthodox medical practitioner’s consulting room, medical journals
and the homes of those who use CAM. It also compares unorthodox practices
in different geo-political settings, namely the global north and the global south.
This book is valuable reading for higher-level undergraduate and postgraduate
social science students, including those in psychology, sociology, anthropology,
health sciences and related disciplines. It is relevant for courses in medical
sociology, medical anthropology and social science and health, and a broader
audience interested in contemporary health issues, controversies and alternative
medicine.
Kevin Dew is Professor of Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington.
He is a founding member of the Applied Research on Communication in
Health (ARCH) group. His books include The Cult and Science of Public Health:
A Sociological Investigation and P ublic Health, Personal Health and Pills: Drug
Entanglements and Pharmaceuticalised Governance . His current research activities
include studies of cancer survivorship and cancer care decision-making in relation
to health inequities.
Critical Approaches to Health
Series Editors: Kerry Chamberlain & Antonia Lyons
The Routledge Critical Approaches to Health series aims to present critical, inter-
disciplinary books around psychological, social and cultural issues related to
health. Each volume in the series provides a critical approach to a particular issue
or important topic, and is of interest and relevance to students and practitioners
across the social sciences. The series is produced in association with the Interna-
tional Society of Critical Health Psychology (ISCHP).
T itles in the series
D isability and Sexual Health
A Critical Exploration of Key Issues
P oul Rohleder, Stine Hellum Braathen and Mark T. Carew
P ostfeminism and Health
C ritical Psychology and Media Perspectives
S arah Riley, Adrienne Evans, and Martine Robson
H ealth at Work
C ritical Perspectives
L eah Tomkins and Katrina Pritchard
C omplementary and Alternative Medicine
C ontaining and Expanding Therapeutic Possibilities
K evin Dew
F or more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Critical-Approaches-to-Health/book-series/CRITHEA
COMPLEMENTARY AND

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

Containing and Expanding
Therapeutic Possibilities
Kevin Dew
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Kevin Dew
The right of Kevin Dew to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-25321-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-25323-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28717-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Kerry Chamberlain and Antonia Lyons for giving me the oppor-
tunity to build on my interests in sociology of CAM by inviting me to write for
this book series. I am indebted to many great research colleagues, far too many
to mention, who have supported me over the years, and to the many research
participants who have contributed so much to my understanding of health prac-
tices. I would like to thank Rick Weiss for his suggestions for C hapter 6, and I
am grateful to the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University
of Wellington for providing me with the institutional home that has been so
accommodating to my academic endeavours.

CONTENTS
Series editor preface viii
Antonia Lyons & Kerry Chamberlain
1 Introduction to complementary and alternative medicine
and therapeutic pluralism 1
2 State medicine, regulating practices and the creation
of alternatives 10
3 Disciplining and integrating practices 26
4 Adjusting to statist medicine and the manipulation
of chiropractic 46
5 Transformation, continuity and the ebb and flow of
Chinese medicine 63
6 Empire, tradition and the many therapeutic faces of India 84
7 The CAM user and the expansion of therapeutic possibilities 102
8 The fraught use of CAM in cancer care 121
9 Incoherent forces: the disciplining and the unruliness
of complementary and alternative therapies 140
Index 149
SERIES EDITOR PREFACE
Critical Approaches to Health
Health is a major issue for people all around the world and is fundamental to
individual well-being, personal achievements and satisfaction, as well as to fami-
lies, communities and societies. It is also embedded in social notions of par-
ticipation and citizenship. Much has been written about health, from a variety
of perspectives and disciplines, but a lot of this writing takes a biomedical and
causally positivist approach to health matters, neglecting the historical, social and
cultural contexts and environments within which health is experienced, under-
stood and practiced. It is timely for a new series of books that offer critical, social
science perspectives on important health topics.
T he C ritical Approaches to Health series aims to provide new critical writing
on health by presenting critical, interdisciplinary and theoretical writing about
health, where matters of health are framed quite broadly. The series seeks to
include books that range across important health matters, including general
health-related issues (such as gender and media), major social issues for health
(such as medicalisation, obesity and palliative care), particular health concerns
(such as pain, doctor-patient interaction, health services and health technologies),
particular health problems (such as diabetes, autoimmune disease and medically
unexplained illness) or health for specific groups of people (such as the health of
migrants, the homeless and the aged) or combinations of these.
The series seeks above all to promote critical thought about health matters.
By critical, we mean going beyond the critique of the topic and work in the
field, to more general considerations of power and benefit, and in particular, to
addressing concerns about whose understandings and interests are upheld and
whose are marginalised by the approaches, findings and practices in these various
domains of health. Such critical agendas involve reflections on what constitutes
knowledge, how it is created and how it is used. Accordingly, critical approaches
Series editor preface ix
consider epistemological and theoretical positioning, as well as issues of method-
ology and practice, and seek to examine how health is enmeshed within broader
social relations and structures. Books within this series take up this challenge and
seek to provide new insights and understandings by applying a critical agenda to
their topics.
In this book, Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Containing and Expand-
ing Therapeutic Possibilities , Kevin Dew interrogates the place of complementary
and alternative medicine (CAM) in contemporary society. He provides valu-
able overviews of the terminology and understandings of the concept of CAM,
documenting how CAM has increased in popularity over the last few decades
and has an important place in healthcare around the world. In shining a light
on complementary approaches (those that sit alongside and help conventional
medicine) and alternative approaches (those that might be in opposition to con-
ventional medicine), we learn a lot about dominant/conventional medicine and
therapeutic healing systems. As the author points out early in this book, ‘there
may be little that unifies CAM’, although throughout the remainder of the book
he shows that there are similarities in some of the more historical and organised
CAM approaches in terms of their understandings of the nature of disease, bod-
ies and health.
Throughout the book, there is an emphasis on providing critical insights into
the relationship between CAM and orthodox medicine in many different geo-
locative, social, cultural and political contexts. Research and evidence is drawn
on to identify and argue for how CAM practice, uptake and understandings are
shaped by social, political and historical forces in different nation-states. This
broad, critical overview allows the author to convincingly convey the diversity,
complexity and ongoing change around CAM. Alongside this, specific case stud-
ies are employed to demonstrate how biomedicine has shaped and disciplined
those healing practices that become credible and legitimate. This includes the his-
tories and practices of specific CAM approaches (and the experiences of practitio-
ners and clients), including chiropractic and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).
T his book offers a thoughtful, accessible, engaging and up-to-date account of
the tensions – and opportunities – that surround CAM in different places around
the world. The book clearly articulates, through grounded examples, how thera-
peutic practices are shaped by dominant societal and political forces and how
nothing remains static in these spaces of treatment and healing. The book articu-
lates the key tensions that play out in relation to therapeutic practices that are
supported by the state and its institutions, and those that are marginalised, and
what this ultimately means for people, practitioners and our understandings of
healing. Thus, the book offers the reader a thought-provoking – and at times
unsettling – consideration of the power and structure of contemporary heal-
ing systems. As such, it makes an excellent and original addition to the C ritical
Approaches to Health series.
A ntonia Lyons & Kerry Chamberlain
October 2020